


Have You Met My Little Brother?

by threesipsmore



Category: One Piece
Genre: Ace-centric, Gen, implied!Marco/Ace, like really implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 06:02:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6317572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesipsmore/pseuds/threesipsmore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not all bad. He gets to see the world, and Thatch had always said the world was something to see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Have You Met My Little Brother?

Somewhere in the heated mist of the rain the Spade Pirates had evaporated. Pops had stood there, large and solid.

The stew Marco offers is burnt but warm- there’s only so much struggling one can do in slick quicksand. He hadn’t expected the bitter sea on the other side, once he'd stopped struggling, fresh and crisp like a glance of brittle wind to the cheek.

Luffy’s poster comes up at some point, _hey pops look at this, it’s my kid brother._

He keeps it in a drawer near his bed, under his socks and the potpourri.

Sometimes there’s a tumble in the sheets with blue fire that licks at his fingers and calves. Sometimes there’s a little bit more after.

“What’s with the tattoo,” Izo asks during the summer, and Ace grins because it no longer hurts.

“It’s my brother,” he taps the ink, “he’ll always be with me, y’know, in here.”

Izo considers him quietly before pointing out a distant whale with his pipe. They watch the foam ripple and lap jealously at the ocean.

The summer breeze tears through them then, the sail puffing out in pride and Ace nods at Izo’s lips. “New shade, right?”

Izo looks a bit startled. “Yeah, you noticed?”

It's the little things, he wants to say, but that sounds kinda cheesy so he just grins and tips his hat.

Pops has him help Thatch with the ropes.

Thatch is only blood and flesh a day later, and Ace has a hard time grasping the concept. Pops tells him not to go, but Ace has always been rather good at ignoring people. Luffy knows that best.

* * *

 

It’s not all bad. He gets to see the world, and Thatch had always said the world was something to see.

There’s the flowers that weep under the moon and the giant moths that eat grass; lakes that greedily devour the sun and the city of lanterns that missed its warmth terribly.

There’s these great big whales that remind him of pops, smiling down at him with thick, bushy teeth. He tries to balance his board on one of them, riding it out like a wave but he slips up half way through and almost sinks, hands scrambling for purchase.

He meets Luffy- he finally meets Luffy, and it’s real good to see him. He’s grown, with this great big smile to him that Ace loves.

It’s no longer just them. Luffy has his crew now, he has friends and Ace swallows that little bit of dusty nostalgia in favor of ruffling his hair, _that scrap of paper will let us meet again._

* * *

 

He dines and dashes somewhere along the way, cackling around the fish bone clutched between his teeth. Not that it leads to anything good. He asks around for Blackbeard and gets led astray by a familiar bush of black hair, which- in retrospect, is his fault.

He hits a doctor who looks so very similar to a certain Marshall D. Teach. The river is cold as it swallows him, the angry townspeople roaring above the currents in anger.

Had they pushed him? Well, he had kicked their doctor.

He gets to think about death in that river, though it’s hardly scary with the splintered sun warming the water as it were. Dying wasn’t so scary.

A milk maid fishes him out and she convinces him to deliver a letter to G-2- which is reckless for sure, because it’s a naval base and really, he’s a pirate on an important mission.

But she gives him milk and he agrees.

He looks damn handsome in a marine uniform.

There’s this stint with a captain’s meeting and some bitter coffee and in the end he delivers that letter with a flourish and a hearty, pirate smile.

Ace gets sketchy, second-hand information on Blackbeard out of the incident.

One night he comes across an old man in his lonely fishing boat, and he slows down so as to not disturb him. He looks dejected out there, solitary and dark amidst the small crescent bay. It’d been a small town, that one, with quiet bakeries and yawning cats. The children minded themselves, playing in the crevices with paper planes and toy bricks.

Ace rides by moonlight, hand to his hat. The chill never bothers him, not really. There’s a train that glints in the distance, quiet as it rides the night with him. It keeps him company for a good while, a few of the cabin lights winking at him from between waves.

He doesn’t like to pay for food, but somewhere along the way he stumbles across these great big mountains capped in dirty snow and ice. A couple lives there, unbathed and drowning in poverty, a healthy bump to the woman. So he pays, and leaves them be.

Bellflowers break through the powder white, crisp and clean. Daffodils that shudder from the cold. He’d take Luffy back here some day. He’d take Luffy everywhere.

He’d show him the wild dogs that sang to the fish and the shy birds that rhymed colorful thoughts. He’d take him out camping like they’d done when they were younger, back when everything had smelled of metal and fish oil and promise.

Maybe, someday, they could visit their treehouse again. Didn’t matter if it was decrepit and sunken in, didn’t matter if it was just two instead of three.That flag would still be there, a lonely, tattered fragment of cloth that watched the sea longingly, a flag that had learned to love freedom as they had.

He fumbles across a jubilant camp, and dances with these girls that matted their hair in fine silver, locks of brown twisting around glittering gem bits. They laugh and sing and Ace claps along, collapsing after a few good rounds.

He rides with them in their dusty caravan, chewing at toffee, talking about anything and everything. They don't know much about the sea, these girls, but they know about the mountains and the prairies, they know where the wild rams nest and where the rivers run clean.

They drop him off at a little lakeside town, waving at him as their cart tumbles along down the road.

The local Inn is expensive and small, but he drops a few coins down and let's the barkeep tell him about the people that had been through. He asks after his family and Ace grins, chin propped up on the old cedar wood bar, toying with his drink. "Got me a brother," he says, "younger. You wanna see a picture?"

He's about to fish out the poster when he realizes it's still back there on the Moby Dick, under the socks and potpourri, and he kinda just fumbles a little. The man laughs it off. "Nah, I think I can see him clearly enough. He'd look like you right? But with smaller cheeks and a bigger grin."

Ace can only agree.

He finds another poster later, clinging to a brothel and that makes him feel a bit nauseous. He takes it and folds it neatly a few times, sliding it into his bag.

He takes a hike with a family from the West Blue, had heard rumors of a man that camped out in those caves up there. The eldest son wants to be a pirate, and his parents laugh in good jest. He whispers to the boy later that he can be whatever he wants to be. The boy whispers back just as earnestly, asking him if he misses his family.

He says his family's right here with him, and he's already digging in his bag for that poster when he asks the boy if he wants to see.

That man in the caves is already dead, weathered and aged, and he’s certainly no Blackbeard.

He hikes down on his own, waving them off as they continue on. He steals a horse from a couple of pissing bandits, a real pretty caramel one with a gentle temperament.

* * *

 

“You look real lonely there, mister.”

She’s a young thing, younger than when he had first set off on his own. He moves aside for her, patting the ground and she gives him a small smile, kneeing in close to the fire he’d started not long ago.

He doesn’t tell her she’s too young to be alone, doesn’t remind her she’s a girl, just kinda sits there and lets her talk about her sheep and her dogs and her little brother. He perks up, and asks if she wants to see his. He fishes for the poster and the numbers don’t scare her, her smile all the kinder for it.

“He’s cute.”

He laughs and she says her home’s a couple of tosses up the road, a great big white house two stories high with fluttering white curtains and a painted fence.

She holds his hand the entire way, having to reach up a bit to do so. She tells him to wait out there by the gate, and so he does. She opens that white door and disappears for a good while, the horse picking at his shoulder as he scratches at its ear. She had said to stay here, right?

Little feet tap against the deck and then the soft ground and she’s running at him with a big jar of jam between her small hands, heaving it back up once it begins to slip. She shoves it into his arms and pushes at his back to get him started, and he’s wondering if her parents know she’d just stolen from their pantry.

She leaves him quietly there, waving from the porch and he tugs on the horse with a growing grin.

He accidentally sets fire to a field one night, the heat cackling as he quenches it. It’d been a pretty thing of golden wheat and ink-tail ferrets. They squeak angrily, scrambling away, and Ace goes hungry that night.

He wants to go home. It’s an ugly phrase, but it’s a true one. He bets Thatch wants to go home too, but he can’t, not now. Dead was dead.

A few days later Blackbeard’s darkness consumes him.

* * *

 

Was Luffy having a good time, was it everything he’d been so sure it'd be, that damnable grin still staining his face? They sure had chalked it up to be something great, hadn't they, this whole pirate business. It'd been everything Ace had thought it would be, so he can only imagine Luffy feels the same. They were like that, him and Luffy. 

He hopes that grin never washes off. 

* * *

 

Blue fire licks at his chest. Thatch is blood and flesh. Pops takes him in like a heavy, unwanted landslide. He promises the Spade Pirates an eternity.

He leaves Luffy just as they’d promise, and there’s no regrets between them because they were the same, he and Luffy.

Sabo is swallowed by the flames Ace comes to adore, weighed down by the sea he still loves.

That old man that sits quietly at the brink of his mind, the one with the ship and no crew and a dying future.

The tiger that had once seemed so strong, back when there were no warlords or emperors or admirals. Just a tiger and a loud forest.

Garp and his proper ways cemented in stubborn fists.

A boy in a stupid, silly straw hat.

* * *

 

He smiles there, kneeled up on the scaffold with his hands shackled behind him, knees bruised and worn. Garp twitches from beside him. He doesn't blame the old man, he won't ever blame him. So who does he blame for this bubbling in his chest, the one that spilled so wetly from his eyes, tasting of the sea?

Down below metal slides against metal, red splattering along the creases of the field. Down below are familiar faces, painted in ways that make his stomach churn, always glancing up at him as if they were so close _just a little bit more._

And yet from up here they looked to be impossibly far away, as distant as that tattered, abandoned flag. _Pops, I’m a selfish son._

He bows his head, skin pressing against the gritty stone before him, the eyes of the world on him. He knows how this ends. And yet-

_I’m so happy, these tears won’t stop._

Here, in the acidic belly of the marines, he’d come to find what he’d been looking for. Maybe he should have listened to the old man and just joined the navy. He chokes a little, grinning into the cement.

And deny these people the chance to love him?

Never.

 

 

 

Luffy is down there, trying so damn hard and he’s grinning. He wants to ask them, ask everybody down there, ask the stoic bastard next to him- _I have a little brother, you wanna see him?_

 

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: threesipsmore.tumblr.com
> 
> I'd meant to write Marco/Ace smut. Do you see how little control I have? Also I keep referencing summer in everything like can you tell how much I want it to be summer?


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